When most people think of winners of the Carl Flesch Competition in the nineties
- and particularly of winners who took all the main prizes - the name Maxim
Vengerov immediately comes to mind. Yet, two years after Vengerov won this
competition a young Austrian by the name of Benjamin Schmid achieved precisely
the same feat. Whilst Vengerov's career has sprawled at much the same pace
as the pianist Yevgeny Kissin's, with acolytes selling out concert halls
and cult status quickly following, Schmid remains largely unknown in the
UK. It can often seem desperately unfair at this stage of an artist's career,
but it may well be the case that Benjamin Schmid ends up the greater violinist
when we come to reassess the first half of the twenty first century.

I arrange to meet Benjamin Schmid on a little bit of Austria in central London
- the Austrian Embassy. It seems the ideal place to meet a violinist who
is steeped in the traditions of Vienna and Salzburg, but as the interview
progresses it might have seemed almost preferable to have met at Ronnie Scott's
in Soho. For Schmid is a violinist very much in the Menuhin mould - one who
feels just as comfortable playing modern-day jazz as he does the Brahms Violin
Concerto.

He is currently playing a series of recitals at the Wigmore Hall - the complete
solo violin works of Bach and Ysaÿe, a formidable undertaking for any
violinist. Throughout the year, these concerts are also being played in Vienna,
San Francisco, New York and Tokyo - his own tribute to Bach's 250th anniversary.
"This is the first ever integral cycle of these works to be done over a span
of three concerts", he tells me. "The main reason is a new idea of presenting
these sets of works together - everyone knows the Bach but the Ysaÿe
are not very well known. The aim is to show the similarities between the
two sets - the greatest written for the violin. It makes great sense to show
the direct relationships which exist between both sets".

I ask him how he came to choose the order in which the works are being played
- for they are not being done chronologically. His answer displays a deep
understanding of what makes great concert programming, as the Wigmore
performances themselves have revealed. "The first criteria was getting the
right pairs. There is often a direct correlation between the pieces - the
second Ysaÿe and E major Bach makes an obvious pairing. He quotes Bach
often and takes a lot of the material and puts it into a twentieth century
context. A second pair is the No 1 Bach and the No 1 Ysaÿe - same key,
same movements, same keys within movements and often the same tempos. Ysaÿe
wrote it after he heard Szigeti play the G minor Bach - and that is also
why he dedicated it to him. The No 4 Ysaÿe and A minor Bach and so on.
I also tried to have one sonata and one partita per evening and tried to
match the pairs so we always have one long Ysaÿe in the first half and
a short Ysaÿe in the second half. You hear Ysaÿe very differently
if you hear Bach before, but in the second half you get to hear Bach after
Ysaÿe which is an entirely different experience. I thought about playing
them in chronological order, but I don't think it would have worked as well".

Schmid's advocacy of Ysaÿe is total. As he talks about the contextual
similarities between the two giants of the solo violin repertoire he describes
the music with a passion that merges intellectual thought with a true inner
understanding of the greatness of these neglected masterpieces. "Ysaÿe
transposed the ideas of Bach - still the highest level of violin composition
250 years after they were written - and put them in a twentieth century
perspective. He was partly influenced by his contemporaries - Debussy and
Strauss - but the violin writing, the technique, goes way beyond anything
before, such as Sarasate, Vieuxtemps or Wieniawski - whom I love. Ysaÿe's
works stand up to a new dimension of writing, a new dimension of violin virtuoso
repertoire. But it is also absolute music. Quite a remarkable achievement.
He made his own ideas within the period".

"I have tried to make the connection between the two sets of works seem clear.
Take the first 8 bars of the adagios of both the Bach and Ysaÿe G minors.
They almost have the same harmonies, but a few whole tone scales are added.
Ysaÿe goes a little further than Bach - six chord strings rather than
four chord, new ways of using arpeggios and even using quarter tones. There
are different meters, but they always emerge from the same ideas that Bach
had. Compare the theme of the fugue - there are the same number of
notes in the motif (he now hums both for me) and there is almost the same
rhymical structure but it is given a new direction. The first interlude in
the Ysaÿe could be by Bach. At the end of the fugue, in both
there is four part writing for the violin. Ysaÿe was one of few composers
who tried this and succeeded. He uses the same material, but uses it in slightly
different ways. Sometimes in quite a brutal way - almost destroying the music
and taking it in completely new directions. It was written after the First
World War, in 1923, so perhaps this is the reason".

It might be assumed that the Bach Sonatas (relatively short, in four movements)
would be easier to surmount than the Partitas (much longer, often in six
movements). Not so, according to Schmid. "The Sonatas are much more demanding
- both from the player's point of view and from the listener's. The Partitas
often use dance rhythms, whereas the Sonatas employ much more complex figuration
and more complex technique". The fact that Bach's scores for his works display
little in the sense of dynamic markings makes me wonder how rubato is used.
"Partly because the Bach requires more emotional involvement and greater
humanity on the part of the player, a violinist has to sense when pianissimo
markings can be used, vibrato etc". I mention, as a prelude to my next question,
Maurizio Pollini's Berlin recording of Brahms' First Piano Concerto as an
example of an artist's technique somehow clouding the emotional and musical
interpretation of a great work. It had certainly been the case with Schmid's
first Wigmore recital that technique somehow didn't seem to matter - faultless
as it was. The performance of the Second Partita struck me as a deeply emotional
and deeply involved reading - something one doesn't always expect when works
have an over developed familiarity with the performer. "Technique is naturally
very important, but it would be a mistake to think that it is the ultimate.
Only when you have the technique can you ever expect to begin to understand
the work's meaning - and that is the whole reason for playing".

Although Schmid is Viennese, and he holds to many of its traditions, his
musical philosophy is a pan-European, transatlantic one. Many young - and
often not so young - violinists are quite content to play the mainstream
concertos and little else. Benjamin Schmid, however, has a very keen sense
for the music of the twentieth century - and in this respect he is perhaps
more akin to Anne-Sophie Mutter than Maxim Vengerov. The Bartok Solo Violin
Sonata, according to Schmid, is the greatest work for the instrument after
the Bach and Ysaÿe, but he also plays John Cage's Etudes at the other
end of the century. He has recorded Christian Muthspiel's Violin Concerto
(on electric violin), with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and has
commissioned Muthspiel to write a double concerto for him - for violin and
cello. A solo work by Wolfgang Muthspiel, the jazz guitarist, called
Passacaglia, has also been premiered by Schmid. Taking the letters
of Schmid's own name it is based on the notes B-E-A-D. Reminiscent of
Shostakovich, I add. Gerhardt Sehidl has written a concertino for him, and
Wolfgang Seierl a solo work, Ferne.

When it comes to tackling other twentieth century works high up on his list
are the Ligeti Concerto, and those of Walton, Britten, Elgar and Berg. His
affinity with the Britten concerto should be a fine one, since Schmid has
recently premiered the Britten Double Concerto. This he has played in Russia,
Germany, Italy and Austria - yet strangely, not Britain. The first performance
was in Israel. Since he is a violinist who is able to effortlessly produce
that Viennese tone, that rapturous beauty that so easily seduces the ear
and fills a concert hall, it is perhaps not surprising that he adores both
the Goldmark and Korngold concertos. French music from the turn of the century
is also a long-standing passion.

His work with Wolfgang Muthspiel was particularly satisfying because of the
strong jazz link. Schmid's passion for jazz is as great as his advocacy of
Bach and Ysaÿe, so it is no surprise that playing jazz should be an
important part of his musical development. He tries to devote at least one
full month of the year to playing jazz - and solely jazz. Most of this is
done on a project basis - either touring or recording, or a mixture of both.
Menuhin is mentioned often as an artist who gave great support to both jazz
and classical music - and who introduced Schmid to Stefan Grapelli. But the
great passion for jazz comes almost entirely from its inherent, and tangible,
difference from classical music. "Jazz is a complex world that needs feeling
and soul. It is never the same as playing the next repertoire piece. It is
music that puts us out of time. You are just able to forget everything around
you. It is the only kind of music I could not live without". The improvisatory
aspect of jazz is perhaps the key to Schmid's passion for it, although he
admits that Menuhin lacked this and Perlman's playing of jazz has very little
to so with great jazz playing. "It is one of those things you can't just
pick up. You have to have an innate sense of what improvisation is and what
you can do with it to make really great music". He continues, "In classical
music so much of it is about rubato playing ; in jazz the timing works completely
differently. You will notice that the absolute timing of a jazz player is
so very different from that of a classical player - and often much better.
There is always a different type of freedom in the use of time". He mentions,
briefly, some recent comments made by André Previn about 'crossover'
music in general, but the comments were specifically targeted towards classical
players who are now taking on the mantle of jazz players. The violinist Previn
specifically had in mind was Viktoria Mullova who is now looking more closely
at playing jazz. It is something which Schmid has little patience for, although
he is as ever very guarded in his own comments and criticisms of others (often
during our interview he has deliberately stopped himself mid-sentence. His
comments about an illustrious Austrian violinist are, I am afraid, to be
left unsaid). In 2002, Schmid wants to undertake a jazz violin summit - probably
taking in New York and Salzburg - so he can play only jazz with Roy Emerson,
the New York trombonist, and his own quartet without percussion.

The conservative Austrian is perhaps more of a rebel than we may imagine.
Whilst talking about jazz I ask him if he has heard of Roby Lakatos - described
in a Deutsche Grammophon press release as 'the best kept secret', and 'THE
name being mentioned time and time again in the underground musical cognoscenti'.
Not surprisingly he has, and his comments are illustrative of a violinist
who appreciates the sheer capabilities of his own instrument. "Lakatos has
done things on the violin that I have never heard done by anyone else. His
technique is amazing - he does almost impossible things with pizzicato".
It is interesting that when he comes to name his favourite classical violinist
he chooses Ivry Gitlis - a wizard at playing Paganini. "He was a crazy violinist,
inspired, but crazy".

Benjamin Schmid is that rare thing amongst virtuosos - an intellectual with
something of a wild side to his character. His interest in German literature
from the 1920s, his interest in anything cultural and artistic from that
era, displays a keen sense of the rebirth which happened after a whole world
order was turned topsy-turvy post World War I. The unity he sees in art,
literature and music bares a strikingly close resemblance to that of his
mentor - Yehudi Menuhin. But he is also adamant on carving out a career that
merges the refined, cathartic sensibilities of the classical with more than
an eye turned towards the development of new music and jazz. It is ironic
that he has often been compared to Fritz Kreisler (and nominates Kreisler's
performance of the C minor Grieg Sonata as one of his favourite records),
when really he is probably the complete antithesis of that great player.
If destiny weaves itself the way it should, then there is every possibility
that Benjamin Schmid will be the twenty first century violinist everyone
else will be compared to.